Sleep Debt
by amazuppai
Summary: Allen and Kanda each struggle with their own personal demons, and are inadvertently brought closer together.


_You open your eyes to blue skies, sunlight filtered through pink blossoms above you, the wind calling your name. The grass is cold under your hands as you push yourself up, standing on the hill and looking out at the lush green fields around you. It's quiet, here. You would enjoy it, if you didn't have a constant sense of unease being here._

"_Yū."_

_You whirl around, searching for the source, but there's still nothing there. You know those voices, all layered on top of each other, perfectly in sync. You know all of them._

"_Yū. Listen to us."_

_Down. There's two points of light on the grass beneath the tree, pale pink. You have a bad feeling about this, stepping backwards into the sunlight, watching your shadow emerge sprawled on the grass, those two pink eyes watching you._

"_We are here," they say, written on the wind, breathing in your ears. The eyes begin to shift, solidifying, growing. Petals. "Can you hear us? We are here, waiting. Yū, help us."_

_The petals reach their full bloom, stretched out towards the sun. The air shifts, their last words echoing in your mind. "Help you?" you ask, but your voice doesn't work here, your words pouring from your mouth as glistening red liquid. You taste iron._

"_Help us," they repeat, and the next time you blink, everything changes._

_It's hot, red, the sun hidden by dark clouds of ash above you. You can hear screaming, thousands and thousands of voices, all screaming in your mind, a cacophony that makes your hands clench, your nails drawing blood from your palms. The fields are all burnt, soot and blood where green grass used to be. The blossom tree in front of you is withered and dead, something carved up the trunk, trailed with blood. Your name._

"_Help us, Yū," they repeat, and then they all break apart, individual voices shouting at you, calling you, begging you to save them, save us, don't you love us, why won't you help us. Your head is going to explode from the force of it all, your knees buckling, landing in the dirt._

_Stop. Make it stop. You don't know how much more of this you can take, these familiar voices screaming at you. You try to scream back at them, to tell them to stop, but whenever you try to force words out of your mouth, you throw up, blood-stained petals spilling across the ground. Everything is on fire. You can't breathe, can't think._

"_Yū."_

_Silence._

_Alma._

_You open your eyes, his shadow standing before you, wavering in and out of focus. It's so quiet, you can hear your own heart beat, your laboured breaths._

"_You failed, Yū," he says, crouching in front of you. His form is black, darker than black, like ink, swirling in front of your eyes. Something in his hand catches the light, flickering blood red. A blade. "There is more, and there is less. You are neither. You have failed, Yū."_

_There's a sharp pain in your chest. Your heart beats once, twice, and then doesn't._

* * *

You wake up suddenly and violently, your body tensing up as you try to breathe, _just breathe, Kanda,_ you can't get enough air in. Your heart thumps in your chest, palpitations you're far too familiar with. It's still dark, the moonlight all you have to see by, pale white on the dark stone of your room. You wipe the sweat off your face as you sit up, shoving your face between your knees as you take slow, deep breaths. God, you hate these episodes. You're twitchy and nervous, your heartbeat thudding in your ears.

You need to go meditate, or something. Just take a walk outside, refresh yourself, bring yourself back to reality. You slip your shoes and your coat on as you step out into the hallway, turning left down the hallway. It's still only dimly lit in these hallways, torches placed intermittently along the walls flickering and making false shadows that set you on edge. It's cold, your breath fogging in the air around you as you walk, step by step by step, counting just to give your mind something to do.

You hear a door opening in front of you and stop dead, peering through the darkness as someone steps out of their room ahead of you. You don't recognise their shape at first, but it quickly clicks into place, the hand held over his left eye, the sounds of his boots as he turns and notices you. "Oh," Allen says quietly, pausing. "Kanda?"

You do not want to talk to him right now, not here. You take a deep breath and resume walking, planning to go straight past him, but he gently grabs your arm, so you pause, look at him now that you're right in front of him. There's something wrong with his eye, something presumably painful. You don't really care. You know he's going to try and talk to you no matter what you do, so you just nod your head as you step forward out of his grasp, an indication for him to follow. He hesitates as you walk, but falls into step behind you.

You head down the hall and out to the left, to the large stone balconies overlooking the garden out the front of the building. The air's even worse now that you're standing directly in it, this high up at this time of year, dew settled on the railing as you put your hands on it. You don't think you could stand still too long on your own right now, your dreams echoing in your head.

Allen leans forward on the railing next to you, a good couple of feet away. He's keeping his distance, though he still can't keep his mouth shut. "I guess you couldn't sleep either, huh?" he murmurs, something odd in his voice. You need to stop paying attention to that.

He's still making pretty poor attempts at starting conversation, as always, but you're too tired and distracted to fight back too hard. "Guess so," you mutter back, keeping your eyes focused on the garden below, counting the trees. You already know how many there are, from your countless nights out here, but you keep counting them anyway.

"Do you get nightmares often?" You stop, look at him, mixed confusion and intrusion. He gives you a small smile, one of those tired that smiles that says he's doing it more out of habit for other people than actually having something worth smiling for. "Sorry. It's pretty obvious that's what happened, so I just thought I'd ask."

Are you really that easy to read right now? You would just go back to bed, but you're still a little shaky. "Sometimes," you concede, looking back away. It's not really a lie, though it does imply that you're not getting them every other night like you are in reality. "Does your eye hurt often?"

He huffs a little chuckle, puffing white in the dark air. "Guess I'm pretty obvious too. It's more of a recent thing, usually it would just ache every now and then." You glance over at him, the troubled look beneath the mask on his face, and you feel something weird in your gut that you think you'd rather ignore. He huffs, taking his hand away from his face and flexing it, staring at it. "It seems to have died down now. What do you dream about, when you have nightmares?"

The question catches you off guard, and you're not sure how to answer. They're different every time, varying degrees of horror and shock but shaking you up all the same. You take a few deep breaths as you think, a shudder running through your body from the frigid air. "I don't know," you say, meaning it as a non-answer, but then you realise it's true. You don't know. You don't know why you have them, what they mean. Half the time you don't even remember them, just the vague sense of panic and fear when you wake up. Your blood goes cold as you remember the most recent one, their voices, your teeth grit.

Allen is silent for a long moment, moving his gaze from you to the horizon, watching the clouds blow across the sky. "It'll be morning soon," he sighs, stepping back from the banister. You refuse to meet his eyes as he looks at you, focusing instead on the ground below. "You should come back to my room for a while, just until daybreak. It's warmer in there than your room ever is."

That's a bizarre offer if you've ever heard one. You'd never have expected that from him, who seems to hate all your ideals and way of living. You don't give him an answer, but it is freezing out here, so you find yourself walking back down the corridor with him, your footsteps breaking the heavy silence. You stop as he opens the door to his room, glancing down the corridor at yours, unsure. He pauses, looks at you, invites you in with a sweep of the hand, that red hand you always refused to touch. You sigh, shivering, and follow him in.

You perch yourself on the edge of his bed, finding that it _is_ in fact much warmer in here, but still not enough to really warm you up. Allen gathers the sheets bundled at the end of the bed, slumping down to sit next to you as he fiddles with them, then, to your surprise, throws a corner over your shoulder, enveloping you both. You shoot him a glare at first, more out of habit than anything else, but he gives you that tired smile, telling you _it's okay, you can let go_. God, you hate this kid. You pull your side closer around yourself, releasing some of your pent up tension with a sigh.

You think it goes without saying that neither of you are going to mention this. You've both seen parts of each other tonight that neither of you would like others to see, and even if you hate each other (you hate him, at least, you get mixed readings from him), you know how to respect each other's wishes. It almost feels... good, knowing you can trust him to keep quiet. You feel all wrong about it, but it feels good.

You sit in silence for a long time, your mind drifting in the darkness. You snap back to reality when he leans against you, heavy on your shoulder, and you're about to snap and tell him to bugger off when you notice his slowed breathing, his expression around closed eyes. Bastard's fallen asleep on you. You consider waking him up, but you just sigh, shifting to a more comfortable position. You'll leave before day breaks, but for now, you're not completely opposed to staying here, where it's warm and you know you won't have dreams.

* * *

He comes back a week or so later, in the dead of night, opening your door and quietly stepping in. "Kanda?" you murmur, roused from sleep, watching through bleary eyes as he slumps down in the chair by the window. "What are you doing here?"

"Shut up," he mutters back, making a point of staring out the window, at the stars. You think you might argue the point, if you weren't so tired, so you end up just falling back asleep. He's gone when you wake up.

He's there in increasingly frequent visits, sitting in that chair. Sometimes you'll wake up in the middle of the night for no reason, see his silhouette there before you crash again. Sometimes your eye causes you grief, making you writhe with pain while everyone else is asleep, and he'll move from the chair to your bed, not a single word spoken as he holds you awkwardly, giving you something to grasp to keep you earthed until it passes and you fall asleep on him. He's always gone before daybreak, slipping out in the final hours of darkness, presumably before he gets caught or you wake up enough to be coherent.

There's one especially cold night that he comes in, curling up in the chair in a way that is so _un_-Kanda that you begin to wonder if he's ever as okay as he says he is. You wake up at some point during the night, the darkness even deeper with the heavy clouds obscuring the moon, but you can't mistake the misshapen form on your chair, arms crossed and knees drawn as he stares at nothing, or maybe something you can't see. You can see him shivering, hear his soft, ragged breaths as he sucks them in through clenched teeth. You can imagine how cold it would be in his own room, with his refusal for anything but a bed, including the heating most of the other rooms get.

He glances at you as you move, shuffling over until your back is against the wall in the corner, patting the bed next to you as invitation. He tuts, looking back away again, but you'll have none of it. You clear your throat, catching his eye as you repeat your action, and he stares at you for the longest moment before he just _sighs_, the chair creaking as he gets up and walks over to you. You pull the covers back for him, and he shoots you a glare before climbing in tentatively, lying as far from you as possible.

You can feel his shudders now, the flutters in his muscles, but they die down a little as you lie there. He turns over after a while, his hands brushing your face as he resettles before he flinches them away. You reach your hands up to take his, jesus, they're like ice, holding them tightly in yours. He makes a half-hearted attempt to take them back, but you tighten your grip, and that's that. Eventually you notice the difference in his breathing, much slower, more even, and feel proud of yourself. You're proud of him, too, for letting you in.

You wake up in the morning to find him still there, spooning you, his breaths even on the back of your neck, and for a moment you're content before you realise the sun's up. He's going to hate you for this, and probably himself. You don't really have the heart to wake him though, turning to see his face, calm for once, hair draped around him and dappled with early morning light. It's peaceful. He wakes up on his own from your movements though, his eyes fluttering open before snapping wide, the realisation hitting him. He shifts back, muttering curses under his breath as he climbs out of bed, making himself more presentable and then pausing, looking at you with something akin to panic, angry as it is, before storming out, shutting the door behind him.

You don't see him for a while after that. You see him around, in the cafeteria, among the hallways, but he refuses to meet your eyes, acknowledge your existence. Lavi tells you he's been spending twice as much time in the training halls and his meditation room, but won't give a single clue as to why. You could probably guess, but you can't bring it up in front of others. You don't want to break the trust he's so painstakingly put in you, that you've _earned_, no matter how much Lenalee complains about worrying for him. You'll give him his due time. It feels weird now, when you wake up in the darkness and find the chair empty. You wonder when you got so used to his presence there. You have trouble sleeping knowing he's not around, for some reason.

You leave for a mission shortly after, returning in the dead of night almost two weeks later, tired and worn but with a sense of success. You make your report to Komui, going down with him to leave the Innocence with Hevlaska before retiring to your room. You need to crash something awful; you didn't get much sleep on the train here, or during most of the trip overall. You open the door to your room and step in, pausing as you catch sight of the shape on your bed, and you almost smile, hearing his steady breaths. You get the feeling he probably didn't get much sleep while he was avoiding you. You still don't even know just how often his nightmares are; if he only came in here after having one, that would mean he gets them rather frequently, several nights a week at least.

You set your stuff down, changing into something more comfortable as quietly as you can before sitting down on the edge of the bed, pausing to look at him. You love his face when he sleeps, the rare moments when he's not wearing some version of a scowl, completely unguarded. He still looks a little troubled now, but you've seen his calmer moments, that one night he fell asleep next to you. You pull the covers back to slip in next to him, curling up against his back, and he stirs a little, muttering what sounds like a questioning 'bean sprout'. You gently shush him, wrapping your arms around his waist, and he doesn't even protest, giving a light sigh as he settles again. You haven't slept that well in weeks.


End file.
